Transcript of "Insight Driven – Partnership Effectiveness"

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Strategic People Management & Talent Acquisition. Improving Partnership Effectiveness If you or your colleagues have ever thought or said any of the following, or anything similar, then we can definitely help you…..…. “we outsourced a key function a year ago but the relations between our staff and theprovider don’t seem to be working well as well as we had expected - in fact, relations seemto be characterised by unreliability and mistrust”…. “ we still seem to encounter resistance and misunderstandings even though we are tryingto work in partnership mode with our employee representatives”….. “ now that we have cracked the commercial aspects of the deal, this partnership is all setto go…. we need to pull together the key people from both sides who are going to have tomake it work…. they’ll need to get to know each other and to work out how what they will beneeding and expecting from each other…” We have a range of experience of providing advice and hands-on support to improve “partnership” effectiveness. 1

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Strategic People Management & Talent Acquisition.It is ever more common to find two more groups from different parts of the sameorganisation having to work together to deliver outcomes that none of the groups canseparately deliver. For example, Groups from Finance, HR and Procurement may need towork together to source and introduce various important new business information systemse.g. new payroll system.In addition, it is also increasingly common to find that 2 or more groups from completelyseparate organisations have to work together to jointly implement partnership or cooperationagreements reached by their respective Boards / Executives.This is increasingly so with the National Health Service in the UK, and in many otherareas within the public sector in particular.In addition, there are “hybrid” examples of the above, such as in pre- and post-acquisitionsituations where groups from previously separate organisations find they need to work“in partnership” with each other towards the overarching goals of the newly created largerentity.And of course, there are many situations where trades unions (or other employeerepresentative groups) and managements strive to work together through either formalpartnership agreements or based on mutual aspirations for a “partnership approach” to theirrelationship.More often than not, groups of people in these kinds of situations do enter the situations withgoodwill and do endeavour to work together cooperatively to deliver their shared tasks.However, whenever groups interact, certain powerful human dynamics have thepotential to emerge (usually unconsciously). Furthermore, unfortunately there is alwaysthe potential for these to undermine relationships and the ability to get things done together.As a simple example, groups often have a default orientation towards other groups of “usgood, them bad”.If these features of intra-group and inter-group relations remain unacknowledged andunmanaged, they can cause groups to experience ongoing difficulty in working effectivelywith each other.Because of this, it makes sense for leaders to look systematically and explicitly at the effectthese forces might have on the ability of individuals and groups within partnerships to workwell together.In work situations though, we can be so focused on our wish to “get things done” that, withadmirable action bias, we push ahead – but without taking the time to think sufficientlydeeply about the human context in which we will be operating. This includes not takingsufficient time to develop and maintain clarity around the partnership parties’ respectiveroles and the expectations that the parties have of each other.Unfortunately, if we push ahead in this way we heighten the potential for the partnershipsituation to evolve into mutual disappointment or mistrust. And we increase the likelihoodthat the partnership will fail to achieve what we want it to achieve.It could be thought of as similar to setting out for the moon without taking account of thegravitational forces that exist within the solar system. 2